<?php
/**
 * <https://y.st./>
 * Copyright © 2018 Alex Yst <mailto:copyright@y.st>
 * 
 * This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
 * it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
 * the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
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 * 
 * This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
 * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
 * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
 * GNU General Public License for more details.
 * 
 * You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
 * along with this program. If not, see <https://www.gnu.org./licenses/>.
**/

$xhtml = array(
	'<{title}>' => 'Letting go',
	'takedown' => '2017-11-01',
	'<{body}>' => <<<END
<section id="dreams">
	<h2>Dream journal</h2>
	<p>
		I dreamed I was washing dishes at work.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="utilities">
	<h2>Utility bill</h2>
	<p>
		I didn&apos;t have time to pay my power bill three days ago when it arrived, and due to the weekend, they haven&apos;t been open again until today.
		I finally opened up the bill, planning to see how much I&apos;d need to pay when I get back from my medical appointment, and to my horror, it said \$84 $a[USD].
		Eighty-four dollars!?
		Seriously!?
		Do I have a major new leak in my insulation or something, so I&apos;ve been heating the outside more than I was previously?
		After a bit, I noticed it had a small memo though: &quot;CREDIT - DO NOT PAY&quot;.
		They&apos;d given me a credit for something, and it&apos;s been more than triple the value of my bill, so I had a little over double that left.
		But why would they give me a credit?
		Examining a bit closer, it seems it&apos;s my deposit from a year ago.
		Okay, sweet.
		I&apos;d forgotten about that.
		They required either my Social Security number or a \$125 $a[USD] deposit.
		That was hardly a choice at all; which one is less creepy to need to hand over?
		This was also back when I hated my name, and with it, my legal identity.
		I didn&apos;t like being tied to that identity any more than need be.
		Of course, I&apos;ve had a legal name change now, and I&apos;m perfectly happy with my legal identity now, but I&apos;d probably still opt for the deposit if I had to do this again.
	</p>
	<p>
		Near the beginning, I actually worried about whether I&apos;d see this deposit again.
		If you&apos;ve been reading my journal for a while, you may recall that they messed up and claimed I didn&apos;t pay the full deposit/bill that month.
		They claimed I underpaid by four dollars, which I then needed to pay with my bill the next month, when they informed me of this discrepancy.
		Supposedly, the deposit would come back to me in a year if I paid my bills on time and such, so would they make a big deal out of this &quot;late four dollars&quot;?
		I didn&apos;t know what kind of company they are - I still don&apos;t, really - so I had I had to assume the worst.
		I had to assume I&apos;d need to fight to get my deposit back when the time came.
		Of course, then I had to go and forget I&apos;d even put in the deposit, so that wasn&apos;t really going to work out.
		At least the utility company was much more reasonable than anticipated and didn&apos;t make me jump through any hoops whatsoever here.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="health">
	<h2>Health and wellness</h2>
	<p>
		My new doctor wants me to get some blood work done tomorrow to screen for diabetes.
		They&apos;d&apos;ve had me do it today, but I&apos;d already had breakfast, and they need me to fast for twelve hours first.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="Minetest">
	<h2>Minetest</h2>
	<p>
		I&apos;ve been rejecting some of the most obvious, most seamless, and best solutions to my problems in Minetest Game as far as building my mods goes.
		I&apos;ve come a long way with squashing my $a[OCD], but it seems I still have a ways to go, at least when it comes to games.
		I&apos;m dancing around certain, arbitrary parts of the game just to avoid touching them.
		And for what?
		It&apos;s making my renewability mod messier and making me less happy than I could be.
		One of Minetest&apos;s main goals is customisability.
		So why shouldn&apos;t I customise it the way I see fit?
		The developers have even tried repeatedly to break people&apos;s dependence on Minetest Game, trying to get people to develop for other subgames as well.
		With that in mind, why should I hold <strong>*anything*</strong> in Minetest Game sacred?
		If I don&apos;t like it, it needs to go.
		End of story.
		It&apos;s useful not to break away from Minetest Game entirely though.
		If I break away at this point, as I&apos;ve tried several times before, it&apos;ll be an act of $a[OCD] in the other direction.
		And all-or-nothing move.
		I need to use Minetest Game as a canvas on which to paint my masterpiece: a game setup that works mostly the way I want it to, but avoids removing features other people would want, within reason.
		At least for now.
		I&apos;d eventually like my own subgame, but it needs to be after I&apos;ve been working on Minetest Game mods for a while.
		Those mods should eventually amass enough gameplay mechanics that the only thing they&apos;ll be missing is a core.
		At that point, I can focus on building that core and making a break from the default subgame.
		I&apos;m very tempted to try to build this core mod now, but it&apos;s still way too early to do that.
		I need more time for my ideas to mature.
	</p>
	<p>
		As for the issues in my renewal mods ...
		First off, I&apos;ve come up with a tonne of strange mineral plants to produce renewable minerals.
		No.
		Those have got to go.
		The best and most correct way to renew the minerals that I can think of is to tap into the lava cooling functionality.
		Instead of only stone spawning that way, minerals need to spawn occasionally too.
		I&apos;ll likely keep the mineral-spawning probabilities lower than would be found in map-generated stone, but it&apos;s an intuitive and seamless way to handle this.
		I&apos;ll likely make lava renewable the same way it used to be in the past before that accursed obsidian mechanic was added: just turn back on regular Minetest liquid-renewal mechanics.
		They were only turned off in the first place to make the new-at-the-time obsidian a finite resource.
		River water though ... that&apos;s a hard one.The only reason river water exists in the game is for the <code>valleys</code> map generator to have a water node to work with that has alternate physics.
		It needs to have regular liquid-renewal mechanics disabled so the slanted rivers don&apos;t overflow.
		Likely, the developers didn&apos;t want to have to be careful about river node placement.
		And why should they have to?
		It&apos;s their game, their rules.
		Then again, maybe I&apos;ll do this the intuitive way after all.
		My experiments seem to indicate that making rivers renew their water doesn&apos;t have the disastrous, world-flooding effect I imagined they would.
		The rivers get deeper, but due to the smaller flow range of river water compared to ocean water, the rivers mostly say within their banks.
		When they <strong>*do*</strong> overflow a bit, the only real problem is that the water makes flat edges against non-cubic nodes (such as grasses) that it flows up to.
	</p>
	<p>
		I&apos;m going to have to get more creative with some nodes, but I&apos;ve got a couple things in the works.
		For example, I&apos;ve got a composting mechanic I&apos;m working on for renewing dirt.
		In theory, dirt shouldn&apos;t even <strong>*need*</strong> to be renewed; it doesn&apos;t get &quot;used up&quot;.
		However, many players <code>/pulverize</code> it after digging it up when it&apos;s in their way.
		They don&apos;t comprehend that dirt isn&apos;t like stone; that it&apos;s a precious and finite resource in need of preservation.
		As the dirt gets destroyed, the remaining dirt ends up spread thinner and thinner.
		I&apos;ve seen it happen on a couple of worlds.
		I don&apos;t want my public world irreversibly damaged just because some idiots end up playing there, so I&apos;m just going to make it renewable from the start
		Sand, clay, and gravel will be tricky to find seamless renewal mechanics for as well, as will coral and desert stone.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="drudgery">
	<h2>University drudgery</h2>
	<p>
		I made a last-minute post today, just to say I&apos;d made the post and gotten something done for the day:
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			That was an interesting idea, graphing the two changes as separate lines within the same plane.
			They overlap though.
			More importantly, this provides multiple values of y for each value of x in most cases, making this not a function.
		</p>
		<p>
			You make a much more interesting point with your second graph though, which is a function.
			It might indeed be possible to hit all three (or rather, four) points with a line represented by a single equation, as long as that line isn&apos;t straight.
			A parabola might do the trick, as you said.
			Likely, it&apos;d take a more complex equation than that though, if one is even possible, if we look at a longer span of time.
			If we use a parabola on too long a span, we end up dipping below zero, which isn&apos;t logical for stock prices.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
</section>
END
);
